Causal Theory of Action

The article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, i.e. unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinises several mechanisms of automatic behaviour, how they work and whether the resulting behaviour is an action: actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualisation, mimicry and semantically induced automatic behaviour (which, however later is disregarded because of its unclarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviours resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and intentional; and even the behaviour resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.

We take ourselves to be able to omit to perform certain actions and to at times be responsible for these omissions. What's more, omissions seem to have effects and to be manifestations of our agency. So, it is natural to think that omissions must be events. However, very few people writing on this topic have been willing to argue that omissions are events. Such a view is taken to face three significant challenges: (i) omissions are thought to be somehow problematically negative, (ii) it is unclear where the event of an omission would be located, and (iii) if we accept any omissions as events, it seems like there would be far too much causation involving them. In this paper, I develop a novel view of omissions as events and as actions that provides answers to these challenges.

According to causalism, actions are events caused in the right way by appropriate mental states. According to responsibilism, the notion of action is understood as a complement to the notion of nonaction, which in turn is delineated by the presence of defeating conditions (e.g. spasms, ticks, etc.). I argue that responsibilism does not, while causalism does, have a problem in answering the title question negatively. The fact that a spasm causes the arm to rise does not compete with a possible additional causal process (with the appropriate mental etiology) that leads to (and overdetermines) the very arm rising.

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting.

One of the biggest issues in theory of action concerns the circumscription of actions in relation to the other phenomena in the universe. Donald Davidson’s “causal theory of action,” supplemented by his “anomalous monism,” is regarded as one of the main lines of response to this conceptual issue. According to Davidson, roughly, a behavior counts as an action if its causal roots partially comprise internal events in the agent couched in terms of thoughts and desires that “rationalize” (i.e., work as reasons for) its occurrence. That is, Davidson proposes that actions are demarcated by reasons explanations, which appeal to thoughts and desires for a given behavior, taken as internal events that explain why that behavior takes place. Davidson’s model inherits the traditional dichotomy between thinking and acting, and is based upon a non-reductive physicalist identity between episodes of psychological events and episodes of neurophysiological events. In this paper, we dispute this influential model in action theory, and advance a behavioral counterpoint, basically in Skinnerian lines, whereby action is spelled out in terms of operant behavior, and the heterogeneous concept of thought is analyzed as a tool for talking about behavior (sometimes not apparent in the outside body) in relation to its contextual determinants. In the behavioral model the dichotomy between thought and action vanishes.
[Uma das grandes questões da teoria da ação diz respeito à circunscrição das ações em relação aos outros fenômenos do universo. A abordagem de Donald Davidson, conhecida como “teoria causal da ação”, complementada por seu “monismo anômalo”, é considerada uma das principais linhas de resposta a essa questão conceitual. Segundo Davidson, grosso modo, um comportamento conta como uma ação se suas raízes causais envolvem, em parte, eventos internos ao(à) agente descritos em termos de pensamentos e desejos que “racionalizam” (funcionam como razões para) sua ocorrência. O modelo de Davidson, assim, herda a dicotomia tradicional entre pensar e agir. Neste artigo, questionamos esse modelo influente na teoria da ação, e defendemos um contraponto comportamental, basicamente em linhas skinnerianas, no qual as ações são caracterizadas em termos de comportamento operante, e o conceito heterogêneo de pensamento é analisado como uma ferramenta para se falar de comportamentos em suas relações com determinantes contextuais. No modelo comportamental, a dicotomia entre pensamento e ação desaparece.]